Top rankings for Metropolitan Opera

Wikipedia article:

Map showing all locations mentioned on Wikipedia article:

The Metropolitan Opera Association of New York
City, founded in April 1880, is a major presenter of all types of
opera including Grand Opera. Peter Gelb is the company's general manager. The
music director is James Levine.

The Metropolitan Opera is America's largest classical music
organization, and annually presents some 220 opera performances.
The home of the company, the Metropolitan Opera House, is
considered by many to be one of the premier opera stages in the
world, and is among the largest in the world. The Met, as it is
commonly called, is one of the twelve resident organizations at
Lincoln Center for the Performing
Arts.

The Met presents a wide array of about twenty-seven operas each
year in a season which lasts from mid-September through May. The
operas are presented in a rotating repertory schedule with seven
performances of four different works presented each week.
Performances are given in the evening Monday through Saturday with
a matinée on Saturday. Several new opera productions are offered
each season. Sometimes these are borrowed from or shared with other
major opera houses. The rest are given in revivals of productions
from previous seasons.

The Met's huge performing company consists of a large
symphony-sized orchestra, a chorus, children's choir, ballet
company, and many supporting and leading solo singers. The Met's
roster of singers is drawn from the ranks of the world's most
famous artists. Some of its singers' careers have been developed by
the Met itself through its young artists programs. Others have been
engaged from companies around the world. Many, such as Luciano Pavarotti, have achieved world
fame while singing at the Met, and a number, such as Renée Fleming and Plácido Domingo, are longtime regular
members of the Met's roster (Domingo has sung at the Met since the
late 1960s).

The Met's artistic standards are considered to be among the highest
in the world. The company's stage facilities and technical staff
offer leading directors and designers a state of the art
environment in which to create any kind of production. The Met's
production designs range from elegant and traditional to highly
innovative and avant-garde.

Beyond performing in the opera house in New York, the Met has
gradually expanded its audience as new technologies have become
available. It has broadcast live weekly on radio since 1931 and has
regularly presented performances on television since 1977. In 2006,
the Met further introduced the innovations of live satellite radio
broadcasts four times a week and live high-definition video
transmissions presented to audiences in cinemas throughout the
world.

History of the company

The gold curtain in the
auditorium

Posters in front of the opera house
before a performance

The Metropolitan Opera Association was founded in 1880 to create an
alternative to the Academy of Music. The
Academy represented the highest social circle in New York society,
and the board of directors were loath to admit members of new
wealthy families into their circle. The initial group of
subscribers included the Morgan, Roosevelt, Astor and Vanderbilt
families. Their creation, The Metropolitan Opera, has long
outlasted the Academy. Henry
Abbey served as manager for the inaugural season 1883-84 which
opened with a performance of Charles
Gounod's Faust on October
22, 1883 starring the Swedish soprano Christina Nilsson. Faust, and all
other operas during the first season, including those written in
French and German, were performed in Italian.

Following Abbey's inaugural season, which had resulted in very
large deficits, operas were given by a "pick-up" ensemble of
relatively inexpensive German singers (which nevertheless included
some of the most celebrated singers in Germany) who performed an
international repertory, albeit in German.

From 1898 to 1986, the Metropolitan Opera went on a six-week tour
following its season in New York. These were cancelled because of
financial losses.

Lionel Mapleson (1865–1937), a violinist and librarian of the
Metropolitan, made the first recordings of live performances at the
Metropolitan. From 1900 to 1904, Lionel Mapleson set up an Edison cylinder machine in the
Metropolitan Opera House to record excerpts of performances. These
cylinders, known as the Mapleson
Cylinders, preserve an early audio glimpse of the Met and are
the only known extant recordings of some performers, including
Jean de Reszke. The recordings were
later issued on a series of LPs and, in 2002, were included in the
National Recording Registry. While many of the cylinders became
greatly worn over the years, some still retain remarkable sound,
particularly of choruses such as the waltz and "Soldier's Chorus"
from Faust and the triumphal scene from Act 2 of
Aida. Mapleson placed his machine in various locations,
including the prompter's box, the side of the stage, and in the
"flies", which enabled him to record the soloists, chorus, and
orchestra, as well as the audience's applause. Many of the original
cylinders are preserved in the Rodgers & Hammestein Archives of
Recorded Sound at the New York Public Library for the Performing
Arts.

The administration of Heinrich
Conried in 1903–1908, which saw the arrival of Enrico Caruso, unquestionably the most
celebrated singer who ever appeared at the Old Metropolitan, was
followed by the 25-year reign, 1908-1935 of the magisterial
Giulio Gatti-Casazza, whose
model planning, authoritative organizational skills and brilliant
casts raised the level of Metropolitan Opera to a prolonged and
unforgettable Silver Age. A prominent lawyer Paul Cravath became Chairman of the Met. in
1931.

Again, the greatest singers and conductors appeared at the Met. At
one point, both Arturo Toscanini
and Gustav Mahler were regular
conductors at the Met.

The Austrian-born Rudolf Bing, was the
one of the Met's most influential leaders. His tenure as general
manager from 1950 to 1972 was, so far, the longest in Met history.
Bing modernized the administration of the Company, ended an archaic
ticket sales system, and ended the Company's weekly one-night
stands in Philadelphia. He presided over an era of great singing
and glittering new productions, and guided the company's move to a
new home in Lincoln Center. Virtually all of the greatest singers
of the era appeared at the Met under Bing's direction. Critics of
Bing complained of a lack of great conducting during his regime,
but such eminent conductors as Fritz
Stiedry, Dimitri
Mitropoulos, Erich Leinsdorf,
Fritz Reiner, and Karl Böhm appeared frequently during his
time.

Among the achievements of Bing's tenure was the integration of the
Met's artistic roster. Marian
Anderson's historic 1955 debut was followed by the introduction
of a whole generation of fine African-American artists led by
Leontyne Price (who inaugurated the
new house in Lincoln Center), Grace
Bumbry, Shirley Verrett,
George Shirley, and many
others.

Following Bing's retirement in 1972, the Met's management was
overseen by a succession of executives. Bing's intended successor,
the Swedish opera manager Göran
Gentele, died in an auto accident before the start of his first
season. Following Gentele, there were Schuyler Chapin, Anthony Bliss, Bruce Crawford and Hugh
Southern. All of these men led the Met in partnership with Music
Director James Levine, the Met's
guiding artistic force through the last third of the 20th
century.

Joseph Volpe was the
Met's second-longest serving manager, 1990-2006. He was the first
head of the Met to advance from within the ranks of the company,
having started his career there as a carpenter in 1964. Volpe
expanded the Met's international touring activities and inaugurated
the orchestra's Carnegie Hall series. During his tenure the Met
considerably expanded its repertory, offering four world premiers
and 22 Met premiers, more new works than under any manager since
Gatti-Casazza. Volpe named Valery
Gergiev as Principal Guest Conductor in 1997 and broadened the
Met's Russian repertory. Cecilia Bartoli, Diana Damrau, Natalie
Dessay, Renée Fleming, Juan Diego Florez, Marcello Giordani, Angela
Gheorghiu, Susan Graham, Ben Heppner, Dmitri Hvorostovsky,
Salvatore Licitra, Anna Netrebko, Rene Pape, Bryn Terfel and
Deborah Voigt were among the artists first heard at the Met under
his management.

The current General Manager is Peter
Gelb. He began outlining his plans for the future in April
2006; these included more new productions each year, ideas for
shaving staging costs and attracting new audiences without
deterring existing opera-lovers (whose average age at the Met is
over 60) . Gelb saw these issues as crucial for an organization
which, to a far greater extent than any of the other great opera
theatres of the world, is dependent on private financing.

Gelb began his tenure by opening the 2006-2007 season with a
colorful and highly stylized new production of Madama Butterfly by the English
director Anthony Minghella.
Minghella's highly theatrical concept featured vividly colored
banners on a spare stage allowing the focus to be on the detailed
acting of the singers. The abstract concept included casting the
son of Cio-Cio-San as a bunraku-style puppet, operated in plain
sight by three puppeteers clothed in black.

Until the late 1990s, the Metropolitan Opera was rather traditional
in its new production designs. Recently, following the influence
originating from Patrice
Chéreau and trends already established in many other opera
houses around the world (particularly those in Europe), that
tradition seems to be changing and traditionally-designed operas
are becoming rarer at the Met.

The trend towards "modernization" continued further under the new
management in 2007 when a flushing toilet was used during the new
production of Gianni
Schicchi (for a work which is supposed to take place in
the year 1299). Victorian era
costumes and surroundings were adopted as the scenery for 17th
century Scotland in
Lucia di
Lammermoor. Even greater contrast was created when
the original mediaeval Scottish dress was replaced by such
twentieth-century clothing as tuxedos in a new production of
Macbeth, or historically
appropriate costume and actions yielded to uniforms of the First
World War and a character's angrily punching a piano keyboard
during the production in 2008 of La fille du régiment.

The Met in Philadelphia

The
Metropolitan Opera began a long history with the city of Philadelphia during its first season, presenting its entire
repertoire in the city during January and August, 1884. The
company's first Philadelphia performance was of Faust
(with Christina Nilsson) on January 14, 1884 at the Chestnut Street Opera House. The
Met continued to perform annually in Philadelphia for nearly eighty
years, taking the entire company to the city on selected Tuesday
nights throughout the opera season. Performances were usually held at the
Academy of
Music, with close to 900 performances having been given
in Philadelphia by 1961 when the Met's regular visits
ceased.

On April 26, 1910 the Met bought the Philadelphia Opera
House from Oscar Hammerstein
I. The company renamed the house the Metropolitan Opera House
and performed all of their Philadelphia performances there until
1920, when the company resumed performing at the Academy of
Music.

During the Met's early years, the company annually presented a
dozen or more opera performances in Philadelphia throughout the
season. Over the years the number of performances was gradually
reduced until the final Philadelphia season in 1961 consisted of
only four operas. The last performance was on March 21, 1961 with
Birgit Nilsson and Franco Corelli in Turandot. After the
Tuesday night visits were ended, the Met returned to Philadelphia
on its spring tour in 1967, 1968, 1978, and 1979.

Technological innovations

Met Titles

In 1995, under general manager Joseph Volpe, the Met installed its
own system of simultaneous translations of opera texts designed for
the particular needs of the Met and its audiences. Called "Met
Titles", the $2.7 million electronic
libretto system provides the audience with a translation of the
opera's text in English on individual screens mounted in front of
each seat. This system was the first in the world to be placed in
an opera house with "each screen (having) a switch to turn it off,
a filter to prevent the dim, yellow dot-matrix characters from
disturbing nearby viewers and the option to display texts in
multiple languages for newer productions (currently Spanish and
German). Custom-designed, the system features rails of different
heights for various sections of the house, individually designed
displays for some box seats and commissioned translations costing
up to $10, 000 apiece." Due to the height of the Met's proscenium,
it was not feasible to have titles displayed above the stage, as is
done in most other opera houses. The idea of above-stage titles had
been vehemently opposed by music director James Levine, but the
"Met Titles" system has since been acknowledged as an ideal
solution, offering texts to only those members of the Met audience
that desire them.

Tessitura software

In 1998, Volpe initiated the development of a new software
application, now called Tessitura. Tessitura uses a single
database of information to record, track and manage all contacts
with the Met's constituents, conduct targeted marketing and fund
raising appeals, handle all ticketing and membership transactions,
and provide detailed and flexible performance reports. Beginning in
2000, Tessitura was offered to other arts organizations under
license, and it is now used by a cooperative network of more than
200 opera companies, symphony orchestras, ballet companies, theater
companies, performing arts centers, and museums in the United
States, Canada, the United Kingdom, Australia, New Zealand, and
Ireland.

Multimedia

Broadcast radio

Outside of New York the Met has been known to audiences in large
measure through its many years of live radio broadcasts.
The Met's broadcast history goes back to January 1910 when radio
pioneer Lee De Forest broadcast
experimentally, with erratic signal, two live performances from the
stage of the Met that were reportedly heard as far away as Newark,
New Jersey. Today the annual Met broadcast season typically begins
the first week of December and offers twenty live Saturday matinée
performances through May.

The first network broadcast was heard on December 25, 1931, a
performanceof Engelbert
Humperdinck'sHänsel und Gretel. The
series came about as the Met, financially endangered in the early
years of the Great Depression, sought to enlarge its audience and
support through national exposure on network radio. Initially,
those broadcasts featured only parts of longer operas, being
limited to selected acts. Regular broadcasts of complete operas
began March 11, 1933, with the transmission of Tristan und Isolde with Frida Leider
and Lauritz Melchior.

The live broadcasts were originally heard on NBC
Radio's Blue Network and continued on
the Blue Network's successor, ABC, into the 1960s. As
network radio waned, the Met founded its own Metropolitan Opera
Radio Network which is now heard on radio stations around the
world. In
Canada the live broadcasts have been heard since December 1933
first on the Canadian Radio
Broadcasting Commission and, since 1934, on its successor, the
Canadian Broadcasting
Corporation where they are currently heard on CBC Radio 2.

Technical quality of the broadcasts steadily improved over the
years. FM broadcasts were added in the 1950s, transmitted to
stations via telephone lines. With the arrival of 1973/74
broadcasting season (December 1973), all broadcasts were offered in
FMstereo. Satellite technology later
allowed uniformly excellent broadcast sound to be sent live
worldwide.

Financing
the Met broadcasts during the Depresson years of the 1930s was
difficult, moving between NBC, the American Tobacco
Company, the Lambert Pharmaceutical Company, and RCA (NBC’s parent company). Sponsorship of the
Saturday afternoon broadcasts by The Texas Company (Texaco) began on December 7, 1940 with Mozart's Le nozze
di Figaro. Texaco's support continued for 63 years, the
longest continuous sponsorship in broadcast history and included
the first PBS television broadcasts. After its merger with Chevron, however, the combined company
ChevronTexaco ended its sponsorship of
the Met's radio network in April 2004. Emergency grants allowed the
broadcasts to continue through 2005 when the home building company
Toll Brothers stepped in to become
primary sponsor.

In the seven decades of its Saturday broadcasts, the Met has been
introduced by the voices of only three permanent announcers. The
legendary Milton Cross served from the
inaugural 1931 broadcast until his death in 1975. He was succeeded
by Peter Allen, who
presided for 29 years through the 2003-2004 season. The present
host of the broadcasts, Margaret
Juntwait, began her tenure the following season. Since
September 2006 she has also served as host for all of the live and
recorded broadcasts on the Met's Sirius satellite radio channel.
Other announcers have included Lloyd Moss who twice substituted for
Cross and Deems Taylor who was heard
briefly as co-host during the early years. In recent seasons
William Berger and Ira Siff
have been heard as co-hosts with Miss Juntwait.

Television

The Met's experiments with television go back to 1948 when a
complete performance of Verdi's Otello was broadcast live on ABC-TV with Ramon Vinay, Licia
Albanese, and Leonard Warren. The
1949 season opening Rosenkavalier was also telecast and in
the early 1950s there was a short-lived experiment with closed
circuit telecasts to movie theaters. Beyond these experiments,
however, and an occasional gala or special, the Met did not become
a regular presence on television until 1977.

In that year the company began a series of live television
broadcasts on public television with a wildly successful live
telecast of La Bohème with
Renata Scotto and Luciano Pavarotti. The new series of opera on
PBS was called Live from the Metropolitan
Opera. This series remained on the air until the early
2000s, although the live broadcasts gave way to taped performances
and in 1988 the title was changed to The Metropolitan Opera
Presents. Many televised performances were broadcast,
including an historic complete telecast of Wagner's Ring Cycle in 1989. In 2007 another Met
television series debuted on PBS, Great Performances at The
Met, which often airs the high definition video performances
produced by the Metropolitan Opera Live in
HD cinema series.

In addition to complete operas, television programs produced at the
opera house have included: an episode of Omnibus with Leonard Bernstein
(NBC, 1958); "Danny Kaye's Look-In at the
Metropolitan Opera" (CBS, 1975); "Sills and
Burnett at the Met" (CBS, 1976); and the MTV Video Music Awards (1999 and
2001).

High-definition video

Beginning on December 30, 2006, as part of the company's effort to
build revenues and attract new audiences, the Met (along with
NCM Fathom) broadcast a series of
six performances live via satellite into movie theaters called
"Metropolitan Opera: Live in HD". The first broadcast was the
Saturday matinee live performance of the 110-minute version of
Julie Taymor's production of
The Magic Flute. The series
was carried in over 100 movie theaters across North America, Japan,
Britain and several other European countries. During the 2006-07
season, the series included live HD transmissions of I Puritani, The First Emperor, Eugene Onegin, The Barber of Seville, and
Il Trittico. In addition,
limited repeat showings of the operas were offered in most of the
presenting cities. Digital sound for the performances was provided
by Sirius Satellite
Radio.

These movie transmissions have received wide and generally
favorable press coverage. The Met reports that 91% of available
seats were sold for the HD performances. According to General
Manager Peter Gelb, there were 60, 000 people in cinemas around the
world watching the March 24 transmission of The Barber of
Seville. The New York
Times reported that 324, 000 tickets were sold worldwide
for the 2006-07 season, while each simulcast cost $850, 000 to $1
million to produce.

The 2007-08 season began on December 15, 2007 and featured eight of
the Met's productions starting with Roméo et Juliette and ending
with La fille du
régiment on April 26, 2008. The Met planned to broadcast
to double the number of theaters in the US as the previous season,
as well as to additional countries such as Belgium, France,
Germany, Italy, and Spain. The number of participating venues in
the US, which includes movie theatre chains as well as independent
theatres and some college campus venues, is 343. While "the scope
of the series expands to include more than 700 locations across
North America, Europe, Asia, and Australia".

By the end of the season 920, 000 people - exceeding the total
number of people who attended live performances at the Met over the
entire season - attended the 8 screenings bringing in a gross of
$13.3 million from North America and $5 million from
overseas.

Internet

Year round, online archived video and audio of hundreds of complete
operas and excerpts are available via the Met Player. Hundreds of
archived audio operas and selections are also available year-round
on Rhapsody, a
service which is free for online listening, and downloadable with
payment.

The Met's official site also provides complete composer and
background information, detailed plot summaries, and cast and
characters for all current and upcoming opera broadcasts, as well
as for every opera broadcast since 2000. In addition, the Met's
online archive provides links to all Rhapsody, Sirius XM, and Met
Player operas, with complete program and cast information. The
online archive also provides an exhaustive searchable list of every
performance and performer in the Metropolitan Opera's
history.

Opera houses

Metropolitan Opera House, Broadway

The Metropolitan Opera in 1905.

The first Metropolitan Opera House opened on October 22, 1883, with
a performance of Faust.
Located at
1411 Broadway between 39th and 40th Streets, it was designed by
J.Cleaveland Cady. Gutted by fire on August
27, 1892, the theater was immediately rebuilt and then in 1903 its
interior was extensively renovated again by the architects Carrère and Hastings. The familiar
red and gold interior associated with the house dates from this
time.

The theater was noted for its elegance and excellent acoustics and
it provided a glamorous home for the company. Its stage facilities,
however, were found to be severely inadequate from its earliest
days. Many plans for a new opera house were explored, but it was
only with the development of Lincoln Center that the Met was able
to build a new home. The original Metropolitan Opera House closed
April 16, 1966 with a lavish farewell gala performance. It was
demolished in 1967.

The theater, while large, is noted for its excellent acoustics. The
stage facilities, state of the art when the theater was built,
continue to be updated technically and are capable of handling
multiple large complex opera productions simultaneously. When the
opera company is on hiatus, the Opera House is home to performances
of American Ballet Theatre
and touring opera and ballet companies.

Metropolitan Opera House, Philadelphia

To provide a home for its regular Tuesday night performances in
Philadelphia, the Met purchased an opera house originally built in
1908 by Oscar Hammerstein I, the Philadelphia Opera House at North
Broad and Poplar Streets. Renamed the Metropolitan Opera House, the
theater was operated by the Met from 1910 until it sold the house
in April 1920. The Met debuted at its new Philadelphia home on
December 13, 1910 with a performance of Tannhäuser
starring Leo Slezak and Olive Fremstad.

The Philadelphia Met was designed by noted theater architect
William H. McElfatrick and had a seating capacity of approximately
4,000. The theater still stands and currently functions as a church
and community arts center.

Principal conductors

Although no one was officially titled "Music Director" until Rafael
Kubelík, a number of principal conductors have assumed a strong
leadership role at different times in the Met's history. They set
artistic standards and influenced the quality and performance style
of the orchestra. The Met has also had a great many celebrated
guest conductors who are not listed here.

James Levine (1973–present)
(Principal Conductor; Music Director from 1975 on)

Deaths at the Met

On April 30, 1977, Betty Stone, a member of the Met chorus, was
killed in an accident offstage during a tour performance of
Il Trovatore in
Cleveland.

On July 23, 1980, Helen Hagnes Mintiks, a Canadian-born violinist,
was found dead, murdered by stagehand Craig Crimmins during a
performance of the Berlin Ballet.

On January 5, 1996, tenor Richard Versalle died while playing the
role of Vitek in Leoš
Janáček's The Makropulos
Case. Versalle was climbing a ladder in the opening scene
when he suffered a heart attack and fell to the stage.

In addition, several audience members have died at the Met. The
best-known incident was the suicide of operagoer Bantcho Bantchevsky on January 23, 1988
during an intermission of Verdi's Macbeth.